Faust at War (Critical Essay‪)‬

IN RECENT YEARS, BRITISH ROMANTICISM HAS INCREASINGLY BEEN CHARACTERIZED as a movement that arose in an era of constant war. (1) If critics once focused on how the French Revolution and the emergence of new industrial practices shaped the aesthetic consciousness of the period, today they are more apt to consider the influence of the unprecedentedly bloody Napoleonic campaigns and the colonial conflicts in Asia and the Americas. (2) Questions about post-Enlightenment transformations of class dynamics and the emergence of the public sphere are thus being revisited in an effort to determine whether Romantic authors offer an alternative to the pervasive militarism of their societies, or if the Romantic movement was itself an inherently militaristic discourse. From the perspective of this ongoing research, the following essay explores uncertainties around the turn of the nineteenth century about what it means to witness a battle, whether as a combatant or a bystander. One of my principal goals is to extend the study of the relationship between Romanticism and war to the German canon. From Ludwig von Beethoven and J. W. von Goethe to Heinrich von Kleist and the Schlegel Brothers, German intellectuals have long been notorious for their love-hate affairs with Napoleon. At the same time, less attention has been paid to the fact that at least a generation before Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War, German poets were struggling to come to terms with the mysteries of the battlefield. (3) My argument is that military operations play a major role in their work and in Romantic doctrines of praxis in general because of the challenges that martial phenomena present to any understanding of the relationship between individual experience and historical events. Focusing on Goethe's autobiographical and dramatic writings, I show that the act of watching a war and the act of waging one both become part of a campaign that is directed not simply against armed foes on the battlefield, but against philosophical assumptions about subjective self-expression, as well. The primary casualty of this line of inquiry is the classical idea of mortal combat as a paradigmatic form of self-assertion. In the travails of the eponymous Faust, the very possibility of waging war--whether in one's own name or in the name of a universal ideal--depends on efforts to defend the supposedly concrete nature of armed encounters against a host of idols and specters who threaten to reduce the tangible physicality of military clashes to the proverbial fog of war. At first glance, military theory of the Napoleonic Era appears to privilege the visual register as unambiguously authoritative. "To command is to speak to the eyes," announced Napoleon, (4) and indeed, the French general was the archetype of the leader who, as Michel Foucault put it, "looms over everything with a single gaze that no detail, however minute, can escape." (5) Napoleon's reputed ability to grasp all tactical battlefield variables in a single glance was canonized by Clausewitz as the essential trait of military genius. On a more popular level, myths about the Emperor's preternatural talents gave rise to an entire generation of war tourists who flocked to the sites of recent battles and perched themselves atop the observation towers where the French commander himself had stood, hoping to participate vicariously in the experiential knowledge won by his all-seeing powers. Of course, one implication of this celebration of Bonaparte and his unique coup d'oeil was that no normal observer could hope to look at the clash of two warring armies and understand what was taking place. Battles thus increasingly came to be regarded as sites of mystery, too large to be taken in with the naked eye, too fast and complex to comprehend even if one somehow could. In the nineteenth-century novel, the resulting difficulties are most famously illustrated by Stendhal's Fabrizio in The Charterhouse of Parma and his inheritor Pierre Bez